File locking: GitLab requires advisory file locking, which is only supported natively in NFS version 4. NFSv3 also supports locking as long as Linux Kernel 2.6.5+ is used. We recommend using version 4 and do not specifically test NFSv3.

no_root_squash: NFS normally changes the root user to nobody. This is a good security measure when NFS shares will be accessed by many different users. However, in this case only GitLab will use the NFS share so it is safe. GitLab requires the no_root_squash setting because we need to manage file permissions automatically. Without the setting you will receive errors when the Omnibus package tries to alter permissions. Note that GitLab and other bundled components do not run as root but as non-privileged users. The requirement for no_root_squash is to allow the Omnibus package to set ownership and permissions on files, as needed.

Tells the NFS client to honor positive cache results but invalidates any negative cache results. Negative cache results cause problems with Git. Specifically, a git push can fail to register uniformly across all NFS clients. The negative cache causes the clients to 'remember' that the files did not exist previously.

When using default Omnibus configuration you will need to share 5 data locations between all GitLab cluster nodes. No other locations should be shared. The following are the 5 locations you need to mount:

Location

Description

Default configuration

/var/opt/gitlab/git-data

Git repository data. This will account for a large portion of your data

git_data_dirs({"default" => "/var/opt/gitlab/git-data"})

/var/opt/gitlab/.ssh

SSH authorized_keys file and keys used to import repositories from some other Git services

Build artifacts, GitLab Pages, LFS objects, temp files, etc. If you're using LFS this may also account for a large portion of your data

gitlab_rails['shared_path'] = '/var/opt/gitlab/gitlab-rails/shared'

/var/opt/gitlab/gitlab-ci/builds

GitLab CI build traces

gitlab_ci['builds_directory'] = '/var/opt/gitlab/gitlab-ci/builds'

Other GitLab directories should not be shared between nodes. They contain node-specific files and GitLab code that does not need to be shared. To ship logs to a central location consider using remote syslog. GitLab Omnibus packages provide configuration for UDP log shipping.

Omnibus allows you to configure the file locations. With custom configuration you can specify just one main mountpoint and have all of these locations as subdirectories. Mount /gitlab-data then use the following Omnibus configuration to move each data location to a subdirectory:

To move the git home directory, all GitLab services must be stopped. Run gitlab-ctl stop && initctl stop gitlab-runsvdir. Then continue with the reconfigure.

Run sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure to start using the central location. Please be aware that if you had existing data you will need to manually copy/rsync it to these new locations and then restart GitLab.

Bind mounts provide a way to specify just one NFS mount and then bind the default GitLab data locations to the NFS mount. Start by defining your single NFS mount point as you normally would in /etc/fstab. Let's assume your NFS mount point is /gitlab-data. Then, add the following bind mounts in /etc/fstab: